join-lemmy.org regularly crawls all active Lemmy instances to keep the instance list updated. Additionally it also collects data from all Lemmy communities. The data is now publicly available in the following git repository:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-statistics
Check the readme for details about the available data. Interestingly the numbers are quite different from other websites:
| join-lemmy.org | fediverse.observer | fedidb.com | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Active Users | 42.170 | 36.336 | 50.063 |
| Instances | 512 | 376 | 446 |
Here are some ideas what to do with the data:
- Recreate the Lemmymap, graphically showing the connections or defederations between instances.
- Render graphs, which could be added directly to join-lemmy.org (#532).
- Investigate what is causing the different numbers shown above.
- Run various types of analysis, like this one done by @malsadev.
- Build a tool to help users discover interesting and relevant communities.
Platforms like Voat have disgustingly promoted fascist ideologies in the name of “free speech”, but that doesn’t excuse leading members of Lemmygrad, Hexbear, and Lemmy.ml from their persistent history of supporting Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, supporting Chinese totalitarianism (not even true communism) over Taiwanese democracy, and disgusting transphobia.
I block the communities on those instances, even those I might be interested in, to instead support the growth of alternatives on mainstream instances. I still want to see comments from their users on other instances though, as many are still reasonable, and the Threadiverse is already too small as it is. I’d like to see it get bigger, and have no intention of returning to Reddit and having my data commercialized, but for as long as Lemmy is defined by those three instances, we are at a strong disadvantage in terms of user growth and retention.